Welcome to a fundamental node of the Pandeism index!!
I. Ketosis
In
human anatomy, the word
ketosis identifies a
metabolic state wherein the
liver begins to break down the body’s natural stores of
fat, using them to fulfill the needs of fuel-starved
organs. Since the cells of the human body are generally understood to prefer
glucose as an energy source, this condition signals
starvation, whether through involuntary
deprivation or voluntary
fasting. Continuation of such a lack of proper
nutrition for an extended period, will prompt the body to proceed to
catabolysis, breaking down tissue not only from fat, but additionally from
muscle and non-vital organs. The body begins to digests itself, to sustain those functions needed to keep the
brain and
central nervous system alive.
Ketosis is derived from
German keton, a shortened form of the German word Aketon, meaning “
acetone.” This in turn may be traced to the French acétone, which in turn derives from the Latin
acetum –
vinegar – from the Latin verb
acere, to be
sour (and what a sour experience it must be, to digest oneself!!).
II. Kenosis
There exists, quite by
coincidence, a
religious concept called
kenosis. The word is used to describe an emptying of the self, in a transformative sense. It is most commonly used in Christian theology, to describe the process by which
Jesus Christ became a human being, through the Biblical God temporarily emptying itself of the aspects of divinity. Various translations of the original Greek describe how Jesus “emptied himself” or “made himself nothing, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are,” in a variant of the term is used in
Philippians 2:7.
The
God of most theistic faiths exists outside of time and space. This poses a problem for those who wish to explain how their God interacts with the existence of mankind, which is entirely bound by time and space. For Christians, it raises the particular problem of how God became one particular human, Jesus Christ, who, in Christian doctrine is simultaneously fully human and fully divine. Although
Pandeists accord this attribute to all humans, Christians diminish or discount the divinity of most or all humans other than Jesus. For Christians, therefore,
kenosis is a doctrine of sacrifice which is potentially more compelling than the human sacrifice embodied in the crucifixion, for it is through this process that the God of the Bible is asserted to have surrendered the attributes of Godhood – including the inability to die, in the way that Jesus dies upon the cross.
Christian theology presents another use for
kenosis, as the reflective ‘self-emptying’ of the believer’s will with the goal of eliminating internal obstacles to receiving the “perfect” will of God. Despite the predominance of its use in Christological theology, “
the idea of
kenosis, the self-emptying ecstasy of God
is crucial in both
Kabbalah and
Sufism.”
Karen Armstrong describes in
A History of God how this attitude is reflected as well in the writing of
William Blake, a Nineteenth Century mystical poet. “Like the
Gnostics,
Kabbalists and early
Trinitarians, Blake envisions a
kenosis, a self-emptying in the Godhead, who falls from his solitary
heaven and becomes incarnate in the world.”
Kenosis was, as well, a fundamental element of the
theology proposed by
Georg Wilhelm Hegel, whose “Spirit which was the life force of the world” was “dependent upon the world and upon human beings for its fulfillment.” Thus “Hegel’s view of the
kenosis of the Spirit, which empties itself to become immanent and incarnate in the world, has much in common with the Incarnational theologies” of
Judaism,
Christianity, and
Islam.
Kenosis derives from the
Ancient Greek word κένωσις (kénōsis, “emptying”) derived from κενόειν (
kenósin, “to empty”) which varies κενός (
kenos) meaning “empty.” There is no etymological relationship between
ketosis and
kenosis. Their similarity, separated by the difference of a single
consonant, is merely fortuitous. But the connectedness of the concepts may well be more direct.
III. Conatus
Yet another concept worth mentioning at thus point (for reasons that will become clear a few paragraphs further on) is that of the
conatus, a Latin term for ‘inclination’ or ‘tendency to move in a certain direction.’ For philosophers of various ages, this term has been used to describe the inherent tendency of things to move towards continued existence and improvement. The “will” sometimes attributed to living things in their pursuit of life, sometimes to the Earth itself, and sometimes to the mere inertia of nonliving things, has been a central concept in
Pantheism since the earliest conceptions of that theory.
The concept of the
conatus is particularly closely associated with its use by
Baruch Spinoza, as related by ecological philosopher
Freya Mathews:
"Spinoza inherited from scholastic philosophy a concept known as that of the ‘
conatus.’ The
conatus, according to the Schoolmen, is the impulse for self-preservation or self-maintenance, and further for existential increase, or self-realization. Under the scholastic interpretation, the
conatus consisted in the unfolding or motion of a thing toward an independently or externally defined form or goal (where the external author of such a form or goal was... presumed to be God)."
Mathews explains that “the idea of
self-interest (an interest in
self-realization) as an informing principle of ‘selves’… resonates deeply with the thought of Spinoza.” Others note that “Spinoza’s monism entails that the sort of individuals that Aristotle regarded as primary substances are distinguished not by their own substantial unity, but by their
conatus — their striving to persist. Thus, self-preservation is not just one possible goal of ethical agents; it is the very thing that makes those agents individuals.”
Mathews finds “a further question which Spinoza himself does not explicitly address, but which springs very naturally from his thinking,” and one which is fundamental to bridging the gap from
Pantheism to
Pandeism, is “the question whether or not the universal substance is itself self-realizing.” Mathews continues:
"Does it exhibit
conatus? Spinoza's failure to consider this is, I think, tied to his failure to develop a dynamic theory of substance:
conatus, as the impulse towards self-realization, is manifested in becoming rather than in being, in an unfolding-through-time rather than an established manifold. This being so,
conatus could not find expression in the static manifold of Spinozist space."
IV. Synthesis
If we apply the idea of the
conatus to the
Deus (the term used to describe the divine force in
Deism,
Pandeism, and sometimes
Pantheism), a light shines through the darkness to illuminate the purpose, the motivation, perhaps even the compulsion of the Deus. If the
Deus is an entity that is fundamentally composed of knowledge, of information, then perhaps the inability to generate or experience a particular form of information is its deprivation, its starvation.
If the Deus is starved for a particular form of information, its
conatus, its internal drive to reach forth and maximize its potentiality and move towards perfection, would compel it to take whatever steps are necessary to fulfill that need. Like a starving body, the Deus is thus compelled to digest itself, to turn its own energy into the matter of a Universe through which it can solve this problem. This radical
kenosis, this transformation comparable to the theistic emptying of the Godhood into the Universe, is really the entity’s own
ketosis, self devouring for the paradoxical purpose of sustaining the self in the only way that could possibly matter to an entity whose primary mode of existence is thought.